The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

While Baldwin was flying from the palace to the port, behind him and around him was the tramp of the rude Coman barbarians, proclaiming that the city was taken. The houses, hastily thrown open as the first streaks of the summer day lit up the sky, resounded with the acclamations of those, yesterday his own subjects, who welcomed the new-comers with cries of "Long live Michael the Emperor of the Romans!" The house of Courtenay had played its last card and lost the game. Pity that it was thrown away by so poor a player.

It matters little about the end of Baldwin. He got safely to Euboea, thence to Rome, and lived twelve or thirteen years longer in obscurity. When he died, his only son, Philip, assumed the empty title of emperor of Constantinople, which, Gibbon says, "too bulky and sonorous for a private name, modestly expired in silence and oblivion." It took, however, a long time to expire. Two hundred and fifty years later one of its last holders was the inheritor of so many shadowy claims that his very name in history is blurred by them. René of Anjou gave himself, among other titles, that of emperor of Constantinople.

Constantinople was taken, and the Latin Empire destroyed at a blow. There were, however, still remaining the Venetian merchants, who had the command of the port, and who might, by holding out until the return of the ships from Daphnusia, undo all. Alexius set fire to their houses, but was careful to leave their communications with the vessels unmolested. They had therefore nothing left but to secure the safety of their wives, families, and movable property, which they did by embarking them on board the ships. And when the Daphnusian expedition returned, they found, to their surprise, that the Greeks held the whole city except a small portion near the port, and had manned the walls. A hasty truce was arranged; the merchants loaded every ship with their families and their property; the Latin fleet sailed down the Dardanelles, and the Latin Empire in the East was at an end.

It began with violence and injustice: it ended as it began. There were six Latin emperors, of whom the first was a gallant soldier; the second, a sovereign of admirable qualities, and an able administrator; the third, a plain French knight, who was murdered on his way to assume the purple buskins; the fourth, a weak and pusillanimous creature; the fifth, a stout old warrior; and the last, a monarch of whom nothing good can be said and nothing evil, except that which was said of Boabdil (called El Chico), that he was unlucky. As the Latins never had the slightest right or title to these possessions in the East, so the western powers were never impelled to assist them, and their downfall was merely a matter of time. In the interests of civilization their occupation of the city seems to have been unfortunate; they learned nothing for themselves, they taught nothing; neither East nor West profited. They destroyed the old institutions, so that the ancient Roman Empire was broken up by their conquest; they inflicted irreparable losses on learning and art; and perhaps the only good result of their conquest was that, for the moment, at least, it deflected the course of trade with the East from the Golden Horn, and sent it by another route to Venice, Genoa, and Pisa.